I want love to feel safer than this.
Closeness can feel comforting and frightening at once.
It can start with something small. A text takes longer to come back than usual, or a conversation ends without the reassurance you were hoping for. Your mind starts replaying the last few exchanges, looking for the moment something shifted. By the time you notice what you are doing, you have already decided something is wrong. Feeling, wondering whether you are simply too much in relationships, or not enough to keep someone interested.
You want to stay close, but part of you is already bracing for the moment that closeness disappears.
What feels like overreacting may have started as a way of protecting yourself, long before this relationship existed.These patterns usually make more sense once we understand where they began.
You have already tried to fix this on your own.
You have probably already tried to fix this: communicating more clearly, choosing someone different, promising yourself you would not need so much reassurance this time. That kind of advice tells you what to do without explaining why it feels so hard to do it. What helps is slowing down enough to notice what happens first.
In sessions, that tends to look like:
There doesn't have to be a right answer before we begin.
You do not have to keep earning your place in love.
I am Micah Fleitman, a licensed professional counselor in Arlington, Virginia, and I work with people who carry old relationship patterns into new ones, often without realizing that is what is happening. I am less interested in getting a reaction to stop than in understanding what it has been protecting.
In session, I want to understand what closeness has required of you and what it has cost. We can look at the ways you learned to earn love, manage other people’s moods, or stay guarded so you would not be caught off balance again. None of that makes you hard to love. It usually means you were paying close attention to something that mattered.
What we offer:
There is no single way to work with attachment wounds, because people protect themselves differently. Some of you can already name the pattern and still feel it take over. Others have feelings that do not have words yet. The approaches below are different ways into the same question: what does closeness require of you, and what would it take to trust it.
Some relationship reactions are tied to moments that still feel close, even if they happened a long time ago. You may know the person in front of you is different, and still brace the way you learned to brace with someone else. Attachment-focused EMDR gives us a way to work with experiences that keep shaping how you respond to closeness, distance, or conflict, without asking you to narrate every detail out loud.
In practice, that can include:
Sometimes your body reacts to a relationship before your mind has caught up. Closeness can show up as tightness, restlessness, or a sudden urge to leave the room. Sensorimotor psychotherapy helps us pay attention to those reactions instead of pushing past them.
This often looks like:
Part of you may want closeness while another part is already halfway out the door. You might have one part that needs reassurance and another part that resents needing it at all. IFS gives us a way to get curious about those different reactions instead of deciding one of them is wrong.
That tends to include:
The relationships you have now can bring up expectations you learned much earlier, sometimes before you had words for them. You may feel rejected, controlled, or responsible for someone else’s mood before you have even figured out what happened. Relational psychodynamic therapy helps us notice how those older patterns show up in present relationships, including the one between us.
We may spend time:
Underneath a lot of relationship conflict is a more vulnerable question. You may be asking, do I matter to you, without having the words for it. EFT helps bring that question into the conversation instead of leaving it buried under the argument.
In session, this can involve:
Relationship experiences can leave behind strong beliefs about who you are. You may carry something like I am too much, I cannot trust anyone, or people always leave. Trauma-focused CBT helps us look at those beliefs directly and understand how much weight they are still carrying in your present relationships.
Sessions may include:
Some relationship patterns feel automatic, hard to reach through talking alone. You may understand a pattern clearly and still feel unable to interrupt it in the moment it is happening. Clinical hypnosis offers another way into reactions that happen underneath ordinary awareness.
This can involve:
Some of this may be about trying to keep a relationship together. Some of it may be about understanding why closeness has never quite felt safe to begin with.
A change in tone, a slower reply, or a little more distance than usual can bring up more fear than the moment seems to call for. You might replay the last conversation, search for what you did wrong, or feel unable to settle until you hear back. Therapy can help you understand why distance feels so threatening, and respond to it with more choice than panic.
You may want closeness right up until it arrives, and then something in you starts looking for the exit. You might get critical, go quiet, or feel a sudden urge to pull back that surprises even you. That does not mean you do not care. It may be how you learned to stay safe when depending on someone did not feel safe at all.
You track other people’s moods closely, and you adjust before anyone has to ask you to. Over time your own needs get quieter, because so much of your attention goes toward making sure everyone around you is okay. Therapy can help you understand where that responsibility started, and practice staying close to someone without disappearing into their mood.
You might worry your feelings, your needs, or your personality will eventually be too much for someone to stay for. Other times you feel like you are not quite interesting or easy enough to keep someone around. This can help you notice how those beliefs are shaping your relationships, and relate to yourself with less shame underneath them.
The people change, but the ending can feel oddly familiar. You might keep choosing someone unavailable, becoming the one who holds everything together, or staying long after you wanted to leave because leaving feels unbearable. Therapy is a place to understand what feels familiar about those relationships, and what choosing something different would require of you.
You can be with someone who cares about you and still not know how to let them see what is happening inside you. Closeness can feel risky, especially if being honest once led to rejection or disappointment. Therapy can help you build ways of being known that do not require giving up your sense of safety.
Kindness can make you suspicious instead of relaxed. You might catch yourself waiting for someone to change, lose interest, or reveal what they really want. That can make a steady relationship feel unfamiliar, even uncomfortable to be in. Therapy can help you notice the difference between what is happening now and what you learned to expect a long time ago.
You can get so focused on keeping the relationship together that your own preferences and limits start to fade into the background. It becomes hard to know what you want when most of your attention is on someone else. This can help you stay close to another person without moving further away from yourself.
You do not need a hard childhood story to explain why relationships feel the way they do. Sometimes it is simpler and harder to see: what you learned from the relationships you depended on, and how those lessons are still showing up now.
Attachment trauma can take shape when the relationships you depended on felt unsafe, inconsistent, or hard to read, over and over rather than once.
Children learn about relationships through what keeps happening, not through what they are told love is supposed to look like.
The lessons learned early can quietly become the expectations that shape relationships now.
These reactions often happen before you have a chance to think about them, because they were learned through repetition, not through a single event.
Not everyone protects themselves in relationships the same way, and you may use more than one of these at different times.
These patterns were learned inside relationships, which means new relationship experiences, including the one in this room, can matter too.
You do not need to know where this pattern started before we meet. We can start with whatever has been happening in your relationships most recently.
In that first conversation, we will likely spend time:
You will leave with a clearer sense of how I understand what you are dealing with, and whether working together feels like the right fit.
Attachment trauma describes what can happen when the relationships you depended on did not consistently feel safe, responsive, or steady. It is less about one specific event and more about a pattern, what you learned through repeatedly needing connection and not knowing how it would be met. Attachment trauma therapy is a way of understanding how those earlier experiences may be shaping the fears, expectations, and reactions you carry now, without requiring you to blame the people who raised you or revisit every part of your history. It can overlap with complex trauma, though attachment trauma specifically centers on relationships and safety rather than a broader range of experiences. Healing from attachment trauma does not mean forgetting what happened. It means forming relationships now that do not depend on repeating the same old patterns.
The signs often show up as a repeating pattern rather than one clear memory you can point to. You might become anxious the moment someone pulls back, feel uneasy when a relationship gets close, or notice your own needs quietly disappearing inside it. If parts of that sound familiar, it may be worth talking through together.
Misattunement happens when the people you depended on missed, dismissed, or responded to your feelings in a way that did not match what you needed in the moment. It does not require anything dramatic. A parent who was distracted, overwhelmed, or uncomfortable with emotion can create this just by being unavailable in small ways, again and again. Over time, that repeated gap between what you needed and what you got can leave a kind of developmental wound, and your nervous system may still be responding to it in relationships now. This kind of developmental trauma does not always look dramatic from the outside, but the attachment wounds it leaves can still shape how safe closeness feels, and healing those wounds usually starts with naming what happened.
Attachment patterns often begin in early relationships, since that is where most of us first learn what closeness, trust, and care feel like. Later relationships can deepen or reshape those expectations too, especially when an important connection turned out to be unpredictable or hard to trust. If most of what you are describing points further back than your adult relationships, childhood trauma therapy may be a closer place to start.
The four attachment styles usually discussed are secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Secure attachment tends to come from relationships that felt consistent and responsive, while the other three often develop as ways of adapting to relationships that did not. These are not fixed categories so much as patterns of protecting yourself, and they can shift with understanding and new experience.
Yes. I am a licensed professional counselor in Virginia, which means I completed a graduate degree, supervised clinical hours, and a licensing exam before practicing independently. Other attachment trauma therapists you find may be a licensed clinical social worker, or a supervisee or resident counselor still working under supervision toward full licensure, which is worth asking about directly. I have also pursued additional training specifically in attachment-informed approaches like EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and relational psychodynamic therapy.
Attachment-informed therapy means a therapist is specifically trained to notice how early relationship patterns show up in present-day struggles, rather than treating each symptom as a separate, isolated problem. Attachment-based therapy approaches, including the ones I use, treat the relationship between us as part of how healing happens, not just a backdrop for talking about your life. That is different from general talk therapy, where relationship patterns might come up but are not always the central focus.
There is no single best approach, because attachment wounds show up differently for different people. Some respond well to EMDR or Internal Family Systems, others find more traction in relational psychodynamic therapy or Emotionally Focused Therapy, and some benefit from a combination, chosen based on what fits you.
Some people ask about other counseling techniques, like CBT, DBT, mindfulness-based approaches, person-centered therapy, or Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. I already use trauma-focused CBT directly, and I can draw on DBT skills or mindfulness-based techniques when they are useful for a particular moment or pattern. Different counseling and therapeutic modalities fit different people, and my core approach centers on EMDR, Internal Family Systems, relational psychodynamic therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and clinical hypnosis, with other techniques woven in when they fit what you need.
Internal Family Systems, or IFS, is an experiential therapy that works from the idea that different parts of you can want different things at once, like a part that longs for closeness and a part that is already bracing for someone to leave. In session, we get curious about those parts instead of deciding one of them is wrong. For attachment trauma specifically, IFS can help you understand what each part has been trying to protect you from, and build more trust between them.
EMDR can help when a present relationship reaction is tied to an earlier experience that still carries a lot of emotional weight. The goal is not to erase what happened. It is to help that experience feel more clearly like the past, so it has less control over what happens now.
Attachment-focused approaches like EMDR, Internal Family Systems, and Emotionally Focused Therapy tend to help people build steadier, more secure relationships over time. How much it helps depends on your history, your goals, and how ready you are to slow down and look at the pattern rather than just the reaction. Most people notice some shift in how they understand their reactions before they notice bigger changes in their relationships.
There is no single timeline, because everyone comes in with a different history, different relationships, and different goals. Some people notice a shift in how they understand their reactions fairly early on, while deeper changes in trust and closeness tend to build through repeated experience over time.
Attachment patterns are not permanent. They were learned inside relationships, which means they can shift through new experiences of safety, honesty, boundaries, and repair. That change is usually gradual, built through small moments rather than one turning point, and understanding a pattern with your mind does not always change the feeling underneath it right away.
My focus is individual therapy for adults working through attachment trauma and relationship patterns, rather than couples or family sessions. I also do not currently offer intensive multi-day programs, residential treatment, or supervised visitation services. What I offer instead is ongoing individual therapy, in person in Arlington or online throughout Virginia, at a pace that stays consistent from week to week, and I am glad to help you think through what to look for if a different level of care or format would be a better fit.
After the first session, the counseling journey usually settles into a steady, weekly rhythm, though that pace is something we figure out together based on what you need. Early sessions tend to focus on understanding the pattern that brought you in, while later sessions move toward practicing new ways of responding and noticing what is starting to feel different. This does not move in a straight line, and it is normal for old reactions to show up again even as things are shifting.
The first step is usually a free 30-minute consultation, where we talk about what has been happening and whether working together feels like the right fit. You can contact me to schedule that consultation, and the next steps from there are setting up an initial session and starting with whatever relationship pattern feels most present for you right now. You do not need a diagnosis or a tidy explanation before reaching out.
Yes. I offer online therapy to adults located in Virginia at the time of their session. Online sessions can still include relational, body-based, and trauma-focused approaches, the same as in-person sessions would.
Look for someone who understands both trauma and relationship patterns, and who can explain their approach in language that makes sense to you. The relationship with the therapist matters here too, so a consultation can help you notice whether you feel respected, understood, and comfortable asking questions.
The first conversation does not have to solve anything.
A free consultation gives us a chance to talk about what has been happening and whether working together feels like the right fit. You do not need a tidy explanation, just whatever feels most present for you right now.
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